Stanford Report, December 4, 2002
Estelle
Freedman says there will be 'No Turning Back'
Professor says her new treatise on feminism draws inspiration
from campus colleagues
BY LISA TREI
Estelle Freedman says her sweeping new history of feminism, No Turning Back, probably would not have been written without the support she found on campus.
Starting with Women's Basketball Coach Tara VanDerveer, who is credited with asking the initial question that led to the book's conception, Freedman is grateful to her colleagues and students across the university for making the book a possibility.
"It's a Stanford book," she says. "The faculty, the program [in Feminist Studies] really gave me a lot of encouragement. I realize that my colleagues here had been stretching me in an interdisciplinary way my whole career. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had the chutzpah to take on a book like this."
VanDerveer had asked Freedman for a recommendation of one book covering feminist scholarship. Unable to come up with a comprehensive title, Freedman jokingly replied she'd have to write that book herself.
Asked
by a colleague to recommend a good book covering the history of feminist
scholarship, Estelle Freedman couldn’t think of one. She joked that
she’d have to write it herself -- and then she did. Photo:
L.A. Cicero
"What was challenging was moving away from my U.S. historic base and
incorporating contemporary political science, art history and social science
and trying to come up with a framework for understanding diverse feminist
movements," Freedman says. "I try to start every section with the historical
context. Then I try to bring in interdisciplinary analyses, such as economic
and cultural explanations for the gender gap in wages."
The book is replete with insights into feminist history that will appeal
to academic and lay readers alike. For example, Freedman writes about
alternative economic systems in the past. In pre-colonial Africa, in a
region that is now part of Nigeria, a wealthy female member of the Igbo
could buy a wife to work for her, becoming what was called a "female husband"
-- although she herself might be the wife of a man.
Freedman also chronicles the struggles women have confronted as they
entered professions dominated by men. For example, in the 1950s, no law
firm would hire a distinguished Stanford Law School graduate named Sandra
Day O'Connor, who ultimately became the first female associate justice
on the U.S. Supreme Court. Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in
United States History, is no stranger to fighting bias herself. In 1983,
she became a nationally known figure when, after 18 months of protests,
charges of discrimination and appeals, the Stanford Board of Trustees
granted her promotion and tenure. Since then, she has published books
on the history of sexuality and women's prison reform: Maternal Justice:
Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition in 1996 and Intimate
Matters: A History of Sexuality in America in 1988.
New website complements book
In addition to a wealth of appendices and notes at the end of Freedman's
book, interested readers can turn to a new website at http://noturningback.stanford.edu
that includes reviews and a detailed "Feminist Resource Site" linking
both historical documents and contemporary feminist organizations.
No Turning Back is written in a simple, readable style and organized
so that readers need not approach it in chronological order. "The challenge
was making it accessible without diluting the complexity of ideas," Freedman
says. "I certainly had a few lay readers tell me to clean up my language
and avoid jargon."
The book is based on Freedman's definition of feminism -- "a belief
that women and men are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies
privilege men as a group, social movements are necessary to achieve equality
between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects
with other social hierarchies."
Freedman acknowledges that at every point where women have mobilized
to extend their authority, they have been met by a "huge counter-mobilization,
which questions [and] demonizes those women, often in physical or sexual
terms, and sees them as a threat to the social order."
While acknowledging the persistence of a chronic anti-feminist backlash,
Freedman's book is ultimately optimistic, as reflected in its title, No
Turning Back. "The momentum I emphasize is forward," she says. "It's
an expanding call for full economic and political citizenship for women."
Freedman co-founded Stanford's program in Feminist Studies in 1981 and
has taught its introductory course every other year since 1988. About
half of the book came out of her teaching and testing ideas in the classroom;
the other half came from research.
Throughout No Turning Back, Freedman considers four questions:
Society's definitions of work and gender change when it considers
these questions, says Freedman. "Women's [traditional] labor is overlooked.
They raise children; take care of families; volunteer in communities."
A redefinition of work has to take place to include unpaid labor. "Let's
call it work and let's value it," she argues.
Freedman acknowledges that there is more space for women's movements
to succeed in "more complete" democracies, because democratic politics
enable feminists to mobilize and influence public policy. "It's also
harder to find feminist critiques in places where women are not fully
integrated into the public economic system, partly because it is that
movement into public labor that creates the dilemmas of 'work and family'
that fuel feminism all over the world," she says.
Changing social attitudes
Although feminists worldwide have different priorities, they share
two basic demands: for women to be fully valued and for an end to demeaning
stereotypes. "Women want to be fully valued for all of their labors,
in the home or for wages, but they also have to have real choice and
not be limited to one realm," Freedman says. "Until you have that, it's
very hard for the project of fully valuing women to be achieved."
For that to happen, the history professor says that what has traditionally
been regarded as "caring" work, such as full-time parenting, must be
socially acceptable for men as well as women. "I think one of the ways
feminism has changed in the United States is from emphasizing women's
ability to choose work that men have historically performed to valuing
as well the choice of women's historical caring work," she says. "But
caring work and breadwinning work need to be open to both men
and women. You're not really going to achieve a gender balanced system
until [that happens]."
Freedman realizes that such a shift in social attitudes could take
a long time, but she puts it into historical perspective. "Think of
how long it took to empower women in the United States as full citizens,"
she says. "From 1848 to 1920 -- from the first call for suffrage to
ratifying the vote for women. If in the 1990s we're beginning to call
for men's access to caring work, it's going to take several generations
to make that acceptable."
Such changes will demand advances in social and educational policies,
says Freedman. From her own battle for tenure to fighting for equity
for other women faculty, Freedman knows that it is possible to change
the status quo. In No Turning Back, she writes that white males
in 1997 held 70 percent of the full-time tenured faculty positions in
the United States, and that at elite universities including Stanford
and Harvard, the figure rose to 85 percent. By 2001, full-time tenured
female faculty at Stanford had slightly increased to 16 percent.
"I think the women faculty [at Stanford] seven years ago were really
pushing the then administration to acknowledge that we were having a
problem -- a real gender gap," she says. "I think, in the last couple
of years, Stanford's administration and other schools like MIT have
started saying that we do have a problem, as opposed to 'It's just fate.'"
She notes that sociology Professor Cecilia Ridgeway describes the problem
as "small scale, unintended but incremental biases that creep into hiring
and promotion." By paying attention to such concerns, Freedman says,
"we will wipe out those biases and begin to balance gender. The current
administration, I believe, is paying attention, and women and minority
faculty will continue to watch carefully to ensure that we move forward
to greater equality."
Almost a decade later, she has. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism
and the Future of Women is an ambitious, 446-page volume that traces
the origins of feminism and how it has manifested itself in different
parts of the world. It explores the world before feminism and traces the
movement's historical emergence. The book discusses the politics of work
and family, and of health and sexuality. It concludes with a section on
feminist visions and strategies. First published last spring, a paperback
version will be released next month.
- Freedman's
faculty profile
- Interview
with Estelle Freedman (Becoming Stanford)
- Reviews of No Turning Back